Donald Trump is plainly unfit for office. His administration has been beset by chaos, he’s pushed the limits of his presidency at every turn, and he’s sought to enact a controversial and often destructive agenda. In spite of all that, he may have a clear shot at re-election thanks to strong economic indicators that only seem to be getting better. The Department of Labor on Friday released its April jobs report, revealing that the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs last month, and that unemployment had fallen to its lowest level in half a century. Trump, who’s counting on the market to boost his re-election bid, responded at once: “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!” he tweeted following the news, which sent stocks soaring.

Trump ran in 2016 on the promise that “nobody knows jobs like I do,” and regularly brags about strong numbers as proof that his policies have caused the economy to soar like a “rocket ship.” Ahead of elections in 2018 and now 2020, he’s made the economy a key part of his pitch, as well as his argument that he should remain in office. “You can’t impeach somebody that’s doing a great job,” he insisted earlier this year. “That’s the way I look at it.”

While a strong economy doesn’t negate Trump’s awfulness, models do in fact suggest he has a point. “Even if you have a mediocre but not great economy—and that’s more or less consensus for between now and the election—that has a Trump victory and by a not-trivial margin,” Yale economist Ray Flair told Politico in March. And the economic indicators have been far better than mediocre; according to Alexander Acosta, Trump’s Labor secretary, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped in April to 3.6 percent—the lowest it’s been since 1969. What’s more, Acosta said, workers have seen their paychecks grow, with wage growth rising at its fastest rate since 2009. In his statement, Acosta also pointedly noted that 5.4 million jobs have been created since January 2017. And that, despite all the ways in which he is clearly bad at his job, could be a winning message for the president.

Like it or not, that’s something Democratic candidates will have to grapple with as they prepare to face off with the president. Though experts were skittish ahead of the election, warning that “if Trump’s policies were enacted, it would be some form of disaster for the economy,” those predictions haven’t come to pass. Of course, there’s no guarantee they won’t still come true—Trump’s ill-advised trade war and his tensions with the Federal Reserve are both live wires—but for now, Democrats are up against a formidable obstacle: most people are happy with the way the economy is headed. A CNN poll released Thursday shows a majority of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, a metric that reached a new high this month.

Of course, the degree to which Trump is responsible for this economy is debatable. Many of the factors that shape economies are outside administrations’ control, which is to say that all presidents likely get more credit and/or blame for the state of the economy than they really should. It’s particularly shifty for Trump to take credit for these economic numbers considering they appear to be a steady continuation of the upward trend under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. “I don’t see how you come into the game with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, your team is already ahead, and you’re like, ‘I won this game,’” Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s top economic advisers, told NPR in September.

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That could prove a fruitful avenue of attack for Democrats, as could a populist economic message. A survey released this week suggests Trump’s policies are still leaving key swaths of voters behind, and that those voters could be open to a new economic agenda. If Democrats can’t figure out how to hit back, the Trump campaign is betting strong numbers will spur voters to hold their noses and vote the president back in. “You hate to sound like a cliche, but are you better off than you were four years ago?” Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, told a crowd in Los Angeles last month. “It’s pretty simple, right? It’s the economy, stupid. I think that’s easy. People will vote for somebody they don’t like if they think it’s good for them.”